Gregory Dudek

Gregory Dudek
Born	Montreal, Quebec
Occupation	Professor
Nationality	Canadian
Alma mater	Queen's University, University of Toronto
Subject	Robotics, Computer Science
Notable awards	James McGill Chair, J.-Armand-Bombardier Prize from Association francophone pour le savoir, Canadian Image Processing and Pattern Recognition Society award for research excellence and service to the community, Reginald Fessenden Award for Science Innovation

Gregory Dudek is a chaired professor of computer science at McGill University, was the Director of the McGill Center for Intelligent Machines from 2004 to 2007, and is the current Director of the McGill University School of Computer Science. The son of poet Louis Dudek, he was made a Dawson Scholar of that university (an honorary title) and directs the mobile robotics laboratory there. He was awarded a James McGill chair in 2008. He has written over 250 refereed articles on computer vision and robotics as of 2015, and is co-author (with Michael Jenkin) of the book Computational Principles of Mobile Robotics which is used to teach robotics at a number of universities [1].

Research

His research deals with sensing for robots and has included theoretical work on the complexity of robot localization [1] and the development of underwater and amphibious robots. He has worked on the use of topological maps and the complexity of topological mapping, an abstract idealized form of robotics problem. He has also looked at robot position estimation using photographic data, and the automated detection of interesting images.

With his colleagues he produced the first formal proof of the complexity of global robot localization in a metric environment (i.e. how hard it is, in the worst possible case, for a robot to determine its position if it totally lost) [2].

Dudek has a wide range of research interests many of which have the common theme of robotics. He works with students in the Mobile Robotics Lab (MRL) at McGill on many problems involving aspects of artificial perception, robot navigation, sample theory (e.g. applications of the secretary problem to robotics and recommender systems.

Education

Dudek attended St. George's School of Montreal and subsequently obtained his B.Sc. in Physics and Computer Science at Queen's University and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Toronto.

Activities

Gregory's research interests often overlap with his personal life and allow him to travel to many interesting places. He and other students in the MRL lab take trips to run experiments on Aqua, an amphibious robot. Greg visited Mexico in 2009. Greg has also visited many other countries.

References

1. Dudek, G. And Jenkin, M. Computational Principles of Mobile Robotics. Cambridge University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0521692120.

2. Dudek, G., Romanik, K., & Whitesides, S. (1998). Localizing a robot with minimum travel. SIAM Journal on Computing, 27(2), 583-604.

External links

• Gregory Dudek web site
• Localizing a robot with minimum travel (official link, but only abstract is free)
• Localizing a robot with minimum travel (free link)